Reclaiming the “Urban Ballet”

As someone who walks ninety-five percent of the places I go, I find myself deeply in line with Conor Friedersdorf (now helping to sub-in over at the Dish with Patrick, Chris, and Conor Clarke as Andrew takes some time off to focus on an essay for the magazine) when he describes his walking preferences.

Says Conor,

Were I given the choice between walking to work on a tranquil suburban trail that winds through a few parks… or else across town on Canal Street, up through the Lower East Side, and into my office… I’d definitely choose the chaotic, noisy, smelly New York City commute. It’s not boring, due to the street-scape and the varied people who inhabit it. Jane Jacobs described it a an urban ballet — which is a lot more diverting everyday than watching grass grow.

I walk to work literally every morning and to do so I spend approximately thirty minutes going through a number of neighbourhoods and then into the downtown core to where my office building lies. As it stands, there isn’t an “alternate route” that I can take that conforms to the happy trails upon which Conor is commenting from his experience as a journalist in California and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Walking throughout the various neighbourhoods that are within appropriate distance within the metropolis where I reside has been an invaluable experience and has caused me to develop a much more, for lack of a better word, organic sense of community than I had when living for a much longer period of time in a city that prides itself on being extremely walkable.

The reason for that is twofold. Firstly, my schedule when I lived in that city tended to be so hectic that I drove most places I went out of sheer time efficiency and was required to get to places in time periods that necessitated driving. Certainly nothing to fault the city in question for on that count, one’s schedule is always one’s to change. But the other reason is that often when I did talk time to do some walking, I was encouraged to do so on just the kinds of paths that Conor describes. Those paths, by and large, tended to removed from the true cityscape of my residency and so little real connection took place, despite how pretty the walk in question might have been.

At core here is, I think, a much more prevalent perception than we often acknowledge: walkable paths are located where they are and look the way that they do because we tend to see our cities as economic prisons that we need to escape when we are not forced to be there for employment purposes, rather than the kind of “urban ballets” that Conor quotes Jane Jacobs as seeing. Of course, this view is largely self-realizing and our impulse to think that real life is only and ever realized once we escape the confines of The City means that we capitulate towards leaving those space unembraced, cold, foreign, and impersonal.

I can say without reservation that learning to set that ubiquitous impulse aside and structuring my life in such a way as to really spend some grounded time within the neighbourhoods of the city where I live on foot has resulted in one of the most sincere and gratifying feelings of connection and affection I have felt in my adult life. That those feelings arise in a city that generally receives a crinkling of the nose from friends I’ve left behind in cities that are aesthetically and perceptually more desirable only really reinforces for me the notion that we tend to overly romanticize our notions about community, forgetting — much to our detriment — just how sturdy the ability to connect in meaningful ways with both our fellow citizens and our built environment is and can be.

I’ve just moved, not far, but enough to warrant a new path to work.

In blazing that trail, I’ve left behind old fellow wayfarers and come to start to recognize new ones. I have the opportunity to discover new pockets of beauty within this city, like the heritage building that I now walk by every morning that is held like a secret revealed only to the patiently-minded pedestrian. And I come to know my new neighbourhood from a vastly different vantage point, feeling its connections to other neighbourhoods and the tanlged beehive of downtown, and imbue it with a love and warmth that allows this seeming prison to release itself with the grace of a ballerina’s perfect arc.

Image via Flickrer roujo

Tagged as: Cities, Conor Friedersdorf, Jane Jacobs, urban ballet, walking, walking paths